The ranting of an IT Professional

I set up a new Lync server, everything worked fine except for conferencing which would fail with the error “Conferencing server did not respond”.

Enabling logging shows the following error

A SIP request made by Communicator failed in an unexpected manner (status code 80ef025b). More information is contained in the following technical data:

603 Decline
ms-diagnostics: 3098;reason=”No MCU Factory Available”;source=”epic-lync01.epic.intra”;OriginalPresenceState=”0″;CurrentPresenceState=”0″;MeInsideUser=”Yes”;ConversationInitiatedBy=”0″;SourceNetwork=”0″;RemotePartyCanDoIM=”No”
Most of the forums speak to this being caused by using a self signed cert but in this case I was using a cert from GoDaddy.

To resolve this you need to enable your certificate for All Purposes.

On your Lync server, in IIS, go to server certificates and View your certificate. Go to the Certification path tab and select the top cert in the tree and select View Certificate. Then go to the Details tab, select “Edit properties and select the radio button for “Enable for all purposes”

Just set up 802.1x authentication on a Cisco Wireless LAN controller WLAN for the first time. My objective is to get Active Directory authentication working for my WLAN, accessible by both corporate laptops as well as blackberry and iphones.

I set up my WLAN with 802.1x auth pointing to a radius server. The Radius server in question is a Windows server 2008 R2 virtual machine with the Network Policy Server role. I installed IIS and submitted a cert request with the internal FQDN of the server. I got my trusted cert back and imported it into the Radius server. I then configured my network and connection policy with PEAP authentication (specifying that certificate and everything worked perfectly.

Good news here. One of the primary concerns about cloud services is that you are completely beholden to the outages of the provider and have no method of really knowing what the issue was and if it will occur again.

“Under the service level agreement, customers receive 25 per cent off their monthly payment if uptime falls below 99.9 per cent to 99 per cent, half of the sum back if it falls below 99 per cent and a complete refund for anything under 95 per cent.”

I am very excited about the Microsoft office 365 offering. At 7 dollars a month you get Exchange mailbox, Sharepoint site, Lync client and way more. I think you would be hard pressed to find this many services at this kind of price pretty much anywhere.

One really nice feature that was in vSphere 4 was a host update utility for upgrading stand alone hosts. I recently found that this utility was removed in vSphere 4.1. Not really sure why this occurred as it was very useful. Oh well, Host Update Utility, you will be missed.

If you read my blog regularly you will probably have noticed that my last few articles have been fixes for installing Lync 2010.

Aside from the obvious observation that I must be installing Lync 2010 and running into issues I wanted to speak a little about the reason I am installing Lync and what I have found so far.

So long time readers may recall that a while back I got my CCVP (Cisco certified Voice Professional) certification and since then I have been working with Cisco’s Unified Communications offerings. While I do like Cisco’s UC products I am always keeping me eye out on whats new in the market. Not that Lync is particularly new as it is just an extension of MS’s OCS server offering but it has been re-branded and expanded to be a more complete UC offering.

So how does it fair? Well pretty good actually. It’s definitely a younger product and lacks the maturity and robustness of some of the other UC products on the market. It definitely lacks some of the advanced telephony features that some businesses (particularly call centre’s) might need. Still the IM and video conferencing pieces seem quite nice, made all the more attractive by the prospect of some type of skype integration in a future revision.

Too early to say really how well Lync will do, but I am excited enough to want to demo it to find out, and I encourage others to do the same!

About This Blog

An IT consultant’s critical (and often caustic) look into the problem’s he faces on a daily basis. This will cover not only hardware and software related issues, but issues involving the vendors and clients he deals with.